Upgrade or Crossfire

[Jopheim]

Okay I have said it before, but I will say it again. I am still getting used to PC's and building, along with trying to understand every little thing that goes along with all of this.

 

I often see on Linus's videos that he crossfires cards. I think that I understand that this helps with the processing of the video from the system to the monitor, but here is my question. If I take a so so (Mid to lower) video card and crossfire them, how if any will this help? Am I better trying to upgrade (Of course this is an obvious option because there are much better cards on the market), but how much would I need to upgrade to see a drastic performance upgrade.

 

My current PC specs.

 

• CPU: AMD FX 8320
• Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
• RAM: ... Perfer not to say yet..
• GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 (X1)
• Case: Rosewill Patriot
• Storage: 4.5 Tb HHD & 128 Gb SSD
• PSU: Evga 600B
• Display(s): Hp S2031 x2 (Considering a 3rd for gaming surround)
• Cooling Corsair: H60 for PCU, 4 120 mm Case fans

[EarthboundHero]

I'd upgrade to a R9 200 or 700 series card. What's your budget though?

[athesean1]

budget?

[lani100]

I would upgrade xfire these cards isn't realy worth it.

[Jopheim]

Budget is ... Really unknown at this point. I know I would NEVER spend $1,000 on a card. I only spent $100 on this card, and would consider maybe a couple hundred (300 + ish).

[D2ultima]

Right now, I would upgrade. Maybe a year to a year and a half ago I'd have said Crossfire.

 

Some things to note:

Crossfire only works in fullscreen.

Some games don't support it; meaning you will be stuck on your 1 GPU.

Your memory on the video cards is copied between each card and not added together for one big pool, regardless of what GPU-Z says. Two 3GB R9 280X cards will only leave you with 3GB of vRAM to use.

If your PSU is 600W, you may not be able to crossfire two top-end AMD cards, because they draw a lot more power than nVidia cards do.

 

Basically, as a general rule, only get a second card if one of the following criteria are met:

1 - There is no better single GPU card available, OR you cannot get a single GPU upgrade which gives enough extra performance to be worth upgrading (for example: if I had a R9 290, I wouldn't buy a R9 290X for an upgrade)

2 - While a single-GPU upgrade exists that would be worth upgrading, it is FAR more feasible to get a second card AND that second card would blow performance of the single GPU out of the water (for example, when the GTX 780s were $480 and the 780Ti was still $650+, getting a second 780 would have been better than buying a 780Ti).

[iPhoenix]

At this point, you're better off going single new GPU - that is actually almost universally better actually, unless you're at the top end of the performance and you REALLY don't care about throwing more money in pursuit of the best fps possible. 

 

The thing that doesn't get mentioned enough is that most games don't scale linearly (as in 2 isn't twice as good as 1).  Also, the other problem is some games flat out provide NO dual GPU performance gains.

[Jopheim]

But again with an upgrade, I want to make sure that I see an increase in the video, and if I am not going to see that within a reasonable budget I would don't think I would upgrade at this point.